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Dan Weston's avatar

“Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay.”--- Sherlock Holmes

Without the memorization of enough facts, there is nothing to synthesize. Sherlock Holmes needed facts/data before he could work his deductive magic, yet we feel as if our children are somehow exempt from this basic requirement? We now, as a comedian once noted, have smart phones and dumb people. Where, pray tell, are the children supposed to get these basic, foundational facts? Well, to paraphrase the Great Detective mentioned above, "Elementary (school), dear Watson!"

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Mea's avatar

i remember when the first iPhone came out, it was so cool to me to think I could look up anything I wanted to look up right in the palm of my hand. I no longer had to lug around my huge and heavy brick of a laptop in order to respond to emails or watch YouTube videos or even send photos and post stuff to social media.

I also remember thinking, "so then why do we need to learn anything if all we need to do is ask Google?" And I got chills. I didn't know why that idea scared me until I had my kids.

Your explanation of new information being added block by block as a new pyramid of base knowledge is exactly how I was taught in school and by my parents. It is how I homeschool my own kids and I can SEE the difference between what my own kids have learned and what their public school counterparts learned.

Even the private Catholic school kids are no better. They have gaps in their knowledge and even they use those damn Chromebooks too.

Worse still are the toddlers I see in my church. Especially the boys, NONE of the toddler boys other than my own can be quiet during the Liturgy. So what do the parents do? They plop a phone in their face and give up. I strongly resisted handing my kids a phone when they were little, people thought I was being ridiculous, but now I have all the older generation coming to me to say thank you for not using a phone on my babies.

This is sad, so terribly sad how the world has just given up on itself. Why do we have to fight so hard to do the right thing? What the hell happened to people in the last 20 years??? It is like some sort of switch was flipped, I don't know when, and now people can no longer resist temptation for the slick and easy thing.

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